For decades, The Tundra Drums newspaper served as a mouthpiece for the issues that mattered most to communities in Western Alaska. Now, a website posing as the former Bethel institution is stealing media content from across the state. But why it’s happening is a mystery.
Earlier this summer, KYUK got a call. Was the shuttered Tundra Drums, once a trusted news source for the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, resuming publication?
The caller was referring to thetundradrums.com website, which had been all but defunct for almost a decade. Over the past two months, though, the website has been prolific in its coverage of Alaska issues. One author, Hadiqah Shahid, has managed to stay on top of breaking news from Anchorage and across the state, all while offering up a rich variety of Bethel stories — using copy and imagery taken from KYUK stories posted just days earlier, among other sources. Shahid has also covered stories from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, Ohio’s Bethel Township, and a Bethel College in Kansas.
Kenrick Mock, a computer science professor and founder of the University of Alaska’s Data Science and AI Lab, said that The Tundra Drums website bears the hallmarks of artificial intelligence.
“The website very strongly looks like it was generated by AI. It has a pretty broad range of stories, some of the common keywords, like Bethel, where it’s pulling in other stories about other places that have Bethel in the name,” Mock said. “Just the fact that a website of this scope could be set up in a small town like Bethel is also a little puzzling.”
Frequent contributor Shahid has no author biography or profile photo, and like other names that appear atop stories on The Tundra Drums website, does not appear to be a real person. Nearly all of Shahid’s news stories appear to be rewritten versions of coverage already online, though multiple short public safety stories, like one about a water outage in Bethel, were apparently written based on social media posts alone. Mock said that the content in the stories themselves also contains tell-tale signs of AI writing.
“(There are) lots of bullet points, (and) not going into kind of specific details or quotes. And so if we’re doing a summary, for example, of another story, they look kind of like this,” Mock said.
Online content farms
There are numerous active online content farms reportedly using AI to rewrite news stories from major publications. On the revamped The Tundra Drums website, articles are presented as original content and do not link back to original stories. Multiple stories contain photos republished without permission or attribution, and a line at the bottom of the website reads “All Copyright Reversed.”
However, the website is conspicuously free of ads. This surprises Mock.
“So of course I first thought when I heard about this was, ‘oh they’ve got some ad banner up there so they can make some revenue by people coming to the site,’ but there doesn’t appear to be any of that,” Mock said. “And obviously, it would cost them money to run the site.”
Some of that cost comes with hosting the site, and in mid-July, whatever privately registered entity is paying for the domain renewed their membership for another year.
“They kept that private by registering through a proxy. So it’s not clear who has actually registered this website,” Mock said.
To the undiscerning eye, thetundradrums.com is a legitimate news site – sleek, straightforward, and a one-stop shop for local, state, and world news.
If there were any question of whether the website is really claiming to be the authentic The Tundra Drums, its Facebook page bills it as “Alaska’s trusted news source since 1974,” the year the former Bethel newspaper was founded.
The current owner of The Tundra Drums newspaper, Edgar Blatchford, did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the website.
According to an Internet archival tool called the Wayback Machine, The Tundra Drums website has fallen into varying states of disrepair since 2016 when it, alongside the print edition, ceased publishing news.
But on May 10, the new incarnation of the website published what appears to be its first story, a summary of infrastructure projects in Bethel by an author named Rebecca Sean. It features an unattributed photo of an Anchorage intersection snapped by an Anchorage Daily News photographer.
On July 22, another unattributed ADN photo accompanied a story about former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson. But this time, The Tundra Drums story also appeared on a massive news aggregator called NewsBreak that does host ads.
NewsBreak pays contributors based on page views, and itself has previously been accused of publishing lifted local news content under fictitious bylines.
Mock, with the AI lab, said that the real endgame of The Tundra Drums website could go beyond simply being listed on profit-driven aggregators like NewsBreak.
“The other thought is it could be basically a test to see what someone can do,” Mock said. “So let’s pick a small place, they’ll mostly go unnoticed, right? But we can try these technologies out, and test them and see what happens, and hone the software for whatever future purpose someone might have.”
As the “About Us” tab on the website explains, “In a world where misinformation is rampant, we believe in the power of responsible journalism to empower individuals and shape society.”
The question of why the namesake of a long-vanished Bethel newspaper has become involved in this mission remains unanswered.
The Tundra Drums did not respond to a request for comment through its website, or through its domain hosting service.
